


Transit and Revelation

by Baozhale



Category: Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: Autistic!Dairine, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-01
Updated: 2014-07-01
Packaged: 2018-02-06 23:16:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1876179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Baozhale/pseuds/Baozhale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dairine and Darryl head off to the Motherboard.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Transit and Revelation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Geekhyena](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Geekhyena/gifts).



Dairine had been putting it off all week, not knowing what she would find when she opened her manual, not wanting to have to deal with the possibility of the manual saying he was _dead_ , not just missing. By Saturday morning, however, not knowing had become worse. _This is even harder than going to his family and telling them he was missing,she thought._ She didn't want to admit why, but a wizards business was truth. _It's because missing is temporary, or has the possibility of being so. Spot knows the answer, and what I find... that's it._

"Can I get a physical status report for Roshaun ke Nelaid?" she made herself ask before she could chicken out again.

"Status for Roshaun ke Nelaid:" And then Spot just stopped.

 _Oh god, he's bugging out on me again. I thought we fixed that._ "Could you repeat that?"

"Status for Roshaun ke Nelaid:" Again, silence.

"Can you bring that up onscreen?"

Spot hopped to her nighttable and flipped open where she would be better able to read the screen. His physical status was blank. _Oh god the manual functions are busted again. Is it because of what happened last week?_ "Clarify. Why would a being's physical status be blank?"

"Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Uh-oh."

 _The point of looking was that I would know! And I still don't know! This isn't fair!_ Dairine tried to pull herself together. _If he's missing so bad that not even the manual knows where he is... how am I supposed to find him?_ was soon followed by _I'll find him. I will. There has to be a way._ .. _the mobiles_ . _The Mobiles!_

She didn't really want to trek all the way to them alone, power expenditures not least of her concerns. Filif was back on his planet, Sker'ret busy acting as Stationmaster, Roshaun, the one who was missing, couldn't accompany her because if he could she wouldn't even need to _go_ , Nita- _I don't want her for this, no_ \- Kit? No, Kit wouldn't go so far off planet without Nita. Then she thought of Darryl. He'd been the local Advisory, she knew, while they'd been away and the adults lost their wizardry, and she and Kit and Nita and everyone else had spent a lot of time together figuring out what had been going on from as many points as possible. Friends with Kit, too, apparently- something about Mars. They'd gotten along well enough, and it seemed like they had something in common though she couldn't put a finger on what, and he _probably_ wouldn't feel the need to tell Nita about the trip or the reasons for it. Besides, he'd mentioned that he'd never been out of the solar system before. Alternate, self-created universes yes, but other star systems in their own universe, no.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Darryl was reading in his room. "Yo" Dairine said as she appeared in his doorway- walking through after making the required niceties with the parents, who seemed more protective than most.

"Yo. Miss me since, oh, Thursday evening?"

Dairine tilted her head to the side, then winced. Her sarcastic head-tilt was too close to the Wellakhit yes-tilt for comfort. "Yeah, maybe. You sounded interested when I was talking about the mobiles. Want to meet them?"

"Well, yes. But _how_? I think over the event horizon of the universe is a bit much even for my co-location, and it's a lot of power."

"That's why I want to find someone to go with me."

"Not your sister?"

" _Definitely_ not my sister. Anyways, assuming we figure out a way to power it without draining us so much we can't do anything once we're there, you in?"

"Sure. Any ideas?"

"I went there with..." there was a lump in her throat. _I will not cry._ "with Roshaun before. We stopped at his home planet, then went on to the mobiles world, using reverse-engineered portals from the pup-tents." Darryl looked at her. "From the exchange he was here on- the Powers supply you with a portal that you can use to go home if you need to, to grab things you forgot or to talk to family, when you're on a wizardly cultural exchange."

"Is the portal still working? And still subsidized?"

Dairine froze. _How did I not think of that?_ "I don't know," she admitted. "I can check. Maybe. It's been through a lot."

It was. Re-engineering the gate took less time than it had last time- she'd messaged Sker'ret and gotten permission to leave from the Crossings, so the coordinates were all ones that had been used before. Not in the same transit, but it still helped. And still took the better part of the morning, by Earth time at least. Rirhait time was another matter, and Motherboard time a third.

Eventually they were face-down on the hard, flat silicon surface of the world where Dairine had woken up a computer chip of a planet and helped create a race of sentient computer wizards who thought faster than the fastest supercomputers of Earth. _Still flat on my face, but at least I'm concious, and I don't think I passed out._ "You ok?" she asked, getting used to the sensation of being in circuit with the Motherboard again and sending the message along that she had, once again, arrived at their birthplace.

Darryl groaned, then rolled to his knees. "Oof. It's the distance, isn't it?"

Dairine nodded. "I think so. Last time it knocked me out, not just over." That wasn't all that had happened last time, though. She had also learned that the mobiles aimed to become a repository of _all_ information, from all the universes, and they had been extremely useful in finding the Hesper. She hoped they could be as much use finding Roshaun. _Won't know until I ask, will I?_

"With?"

"GIGO!" Dairine hugged the mobile as soon as she was close enough to do so, and then, even against her determination otherwise, she started to cry, because of who was _not_ here this time.

Darryl flinched, then started shaking, visibly but barely so, at least to the human eye. GIGO must have noticed. "Is your... counterpart in distress?" he asked Dairine, concerned.

"You... you can ask _me_ that!" Darryl said before Dairine could answer. "And I'm fine. I just... I feel things, sometimes. What other people are feeling. And the one looking out of their eyes."

"Apologies. If there is anything we can do to help, let us know. In the meantime..." GIGO activated the spell-diagram that served as transit on the planets surface, and they began to accelerate towards where Dairine knew the city was. She wanted to see the look on Darryl's face.

Darryl shrugged. "I had a chance to change it, once. I didn't want to then, and my answer hasn't changed." For an instant, Dairine's look changed to one of confusion, long enough for Darryl to pick up on it. He continued. "Autism thing, apparently. Or one of the ways autism can be. I did a lot of reading about it after I got out of my burnout- some of us have trouble reading emotions at all, even our own at times, some of us are _too_ closely in touch and it hurts."

"Then the way your brain is put together is not typical?" GIGO asked.

Dairine heard the machine conciousness continue, but presumably Darryl did not, considering that he started to reply.

"No, one or two in a hundred or so, and people like to make a huge fuss..." he started to explain.

She was paying more attention to the machine conciousness. "It's fairly similar to Mothers... and different from Roshauns. We presumed that was simply species differences." She gulped as the Motherboard brought up memories from her own childhood, ones that made it clear she was _not_ like most children, hadn't been even before she had become part manual and part machine, even before the machine portions of who she was began to crowd out the simply human. Making friends by learning the patterns of how people worked, not by something natural, learning to read on her own, again with these patterns, simply wanting to know things, the fact that she had even been able to just decide not to cry anymore and do it for so long, though the explosions had to come out somewhere. _Wouldn't someone have noticed?_ Diagnostic data appeared- girls, especially girls who could speak, tended to be diagnosed later, if at all. _This is silly, I can't be autistic. They just don't have many samples of how human minds are put together, that's all. We're so far out, Darryl and me are the only ones they've seen since they started gathering all this information, add Kit and Nita if they took and saved that data._ And then the data was there. Dairine, Nita, and Darryl were certainly not identical, but there were far more similarities between the three of them than between any of them and Kit.

"It tends to run in families, though people- parents mostly- don't like to admit it" she vaguely heard Darryl saying, as somewhere the mobiles found an average model of sorts which wasn't like her (of course not) or Nita or Kit or Darryl. Spot's voice took responsibility for the model of an "average" human brain.

 _Are these differences big enough to be statistically significant?_ And the analysis was there. Yes. There was no mistaking it: She (or the parts of her that were still human, at least) and her sister and Darryl were all different from the average in very similar ways, and a look at the way wizardry changed human brains told her it wasn't just wizardry. They were... they were autistic. All three of them, not just Darryl. _But why would no one have noticed this before? What does it mean? Did you know?_ she demanded of Spot.

 _No. I didn't pull this data until you asked for it, but now that it's here..._ Dairine detected the machine equivalent of a shrug. Clearly Spot considered the information minor, something she was having trouble with given the pictures she'd been given of what it meant. But then, Darryl didn't look like those pictures either.

 _If my best friend and manual can take the revelation calmly, so can I._ She filed the information away for later. It would probably be useful, though she wasn't sure what for. She could worry about it at home. _And how to tell Nita. Should I tell Nita?_ She could worry about that at home too. _I'm here for Roshaun, to at least know how to start finding him._

Darryl's gasp as the towers of the mobile city came into view shook Dairine out of her distraction. It was impressive, and in even the short time since she had been here last, it had continued to grow. Up, out, around, an ever-growing city of true computer wizards, each a supercomputer in its own right and connected to an even greater one. If ever there was a species that could acquire more information than even the manual, it was them.

**Author's Note:**

> I did re-use some concepts from here in my original work, Where None Have Thought To Go.   
> https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00N18VLV0


End file.
